Once There Were Wolves

There is cruelty to survive, to fight against, but there is gentleness more than anything, our roots deep and entangled.

You don’t have to be a victim to care,” she says. “You just have to have empathy in bucket loads.”

A grin split her face. “It’s wolves, baby. Fucking wolves.” And

“There are languages without words, without voices.

For the crimes of having attacked two people, crimes she did not commit.

She lies her body next to mine. And as the rest of her pack move to join her, pressing their warmth around us and saving us from the cold, I lower my face into the white of her neck and I weep.

I was too stubborn, too willfully blind, keener to accuse the man I love than to accuse the animals I brought here.

I know he grew up in the very far north of Norway, way up in the Arctic Circle, and he has spoken to me before of his memories of the ’80s, when wild wolves returned to Norway.

Niels joins me with an offered mug of tea. In his mid-fifties,

“I’m studying the cognitive maps wolves make of their territories. They pass these geographic and temporal maps down through generations, and know their land so intimately that they go nowhere unless it’s deliberate. Wolves don’t wander. They move with purpose, and they teach their pups how to do the same. They can share the mental images with each other.”